One Last Lie

by Paul Doiron

  Unable to do anything except crawl forward, I put in a call to the officer supervising the search for a new chief warden pilot. Major Patrick Shorey had been on the panel that had hired me eight years earlier. His had been a dissenting voice. So of course, he was an unabashed champion of Tom Wheelwright.

  “You said this Seminole you interviewed suffered a brain injury?”

  “Captain Fixico is Miccosukee, not Seminole.”

  “The point is he has memory problems.”

  “But the two women I spoke with don’t, and they were both open about the extent of Wheelwright’s sexual misconduct—assaults is the better word.”

  “Why didn’t they file complaints against him with the air force?”

  “They say they were dissuaded from doing so by their superiors.”

  “Two dozen people vouched that Captain Wheelwright conducted himself with bravery and professionalism. Why should we take the word of these women?”

  “Because they didn’t know about each other. They never served together. There’s no way they could have coordinated their stories.”

  “It’s a fine world we’re living in when a war hero can have his reputation destroyed by undocumented allegations.”

  “Captain Fixico gave me more names if you’d like—”

  “Just send me the damned report.”

  The traffic began to inch ahead, then stopped again.

  I checked my messages and found a text from the kid I’d hired to watch my dog. Logan Cronk was the son of friends who lived down the road from me on the Maine Midcoast. The boy was ten, blond, and big for his age (or any age).

  Shadow ate a turkey poult! It landed inside in his pen while he was sleeping under the trees and it didn’t see him and he leaped out from the bushes and ate it in like three bites.

  Legally speaking, Shadow wasn’t a dog; he was a wolf dog. To be even more precise, he was a gray wolf with a smattering of domestic dog genes. His “pen” was a fenced enclosure on my wooded property, roughly one and a half acres in area.

  Logan had attached several photographs so that I could rest assured he had been fulfilling his duties. One picture was of himself holding a turkey wing pinion, presumably all that was left of Shadow’s lunch.

  I wrote the boy back thanking him and adding that he’d better not have ventured inside the fence to retrieve those feathers. The wolf dog may have been raised in captivity, but he had spent the past few years on the run in the Maine mountains, killing deer and digging beavers out of their lodges, and I didn’t trust him not to eat children.

  I considered the empty hours ahead. My ex-girlfriend Stacey Stevens, the woman I had once considered the love of my life and who was not insignificantly the daughter of my mentor Charley and his wife, Ora, lived less than two hours away.

  Stacey’s last communication, months before, had been an email that ended with the words, “If by some small miracle you’re ever in Florida, I would love, love, love to see you.”

  Before I could slip down this dangerous slope, I called my current girlfriend back home.

  “I’m afraid I’m here for one more night,” I told Danielle “Dani” Tate.

  “I hope the last interview was worth it.”

  “Let’s just say that Tom Wheelwright will never be a member of the Maine Warden Service.”

  Dani was younger than I was, a former game warden who had transferred to the Maine State Police because she saw greater opportunities for advancement. To the world, she presented one face: snub-nosed, gruff, blond hair tied up tight, a badass cop. To me and me alone, she showed a gentler profile: soft gray eyes, dimples that only made themselves known when she smiled, a heart that was twice the size of mine.

  As the sky darkened at the edges, leaving a hazy dome of light above the city, I told Dani about Fixico. She listened quietly as I recounted the day’s revelations. Proud of myself, I ended the monologue with two of the women Wheelwright had coerced into having sex with him.

  “Congratulations,” Dani said.

  I detected an undercurrent of sarcasm. “Thanks?”

  “No, it’s great that you nailed Wheelwright. But the odds are good that the guy you end up hiring will be a sleaze, too. He’ll just be better at covering his tracks.” She let that sit with me for a moment, then her tone lightened again. “So what are you going to do with your free night in Miami? Go clubbing in South Beach?”

  “The last footprints I left on a dance floor were in junior high.”

  “That’s probably for the best.”

  The joke was at her expense as well as mine—Trooper Tate was not remotely footloose.

  “What?” I laughed. “You don’t think I can dance?”

  “You won’t like my answer to that question.”

  I paused before I spoke again. “I promised Stacey I would be in touch if I ever got down this way.”

  Dani didn’t skip a beat. “Doesn’t she live over on the Gulf Coast?”

  “Everglades City. That’s about two hours from here, I think. Chances are she’ll be busy anyway, but I will have made an effort. And her folks will be happy—which matters to me, as you know. I’ll probably end up back at my motel with a pizza, watching baseball.”

  “You’re presuming I’m jealous.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m not in sixth grade, Mike. You two shared a lot together. It’s sad if you can’t be friends. I trust you, and I hope you trust me. Give Stacey my best if you see her.”

  “The truth is, I could use a good night’s rest.”

  “Me, too. I think I caught a bug.”

  * * *

  My favorite photo of Stacey stared up from the lighted screen of my phone. I had taken the picture on a summer evening four years earlier while we were canoeing the famed Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. Her dark hair was tousled. There was a sheen of perspiration on her cheekbones. Her eyes were the color of jade.

  Stacey and I had lived together for close to two years, and everyone assumed we would get married. She was the daughter of people I already loved like parents. We shared a passion for the outdoors. She was intelligent, fearless, and capable. For a long time, I had believed she must be my soul mate.

  In the end, it was the qualities we had in common that drove us apart. Where I was reckless, she was almost pathologically irresponsible. Where I was stubborn, she was unyielding to a fault. Where I was quick to anger, she stoked her rage with a red-hot poker. Our decision to separate had been no less sad for being by mutual agreement.

  Stacey answered at once. “Well, howdy, stranger!”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I have you in my list of favorites. I’m looking at your picture right now. You’re in your field uniform, looking all brooding and handsome.”

  “I don’t look like that anymore. I grew my hair out for my job as an investigator.”

  “Just as long as it isn’t a mullet. So, listen, I’d love to catch up, but you caught me as I was walking out the door.”

  Was it relief I felt or disappointment? “I’ll let you go then.”

  “Not without telling me why you called. What’s up?”

  “I’m in Florida.”

  “No shit? Where?”

  “West of Miami. I’m stuck in traffic on the 836. I just saw an exit for Sweetwater.”

  “You have to come see me! You’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you pass this up.”

  “Pass what up?” I asked, worried.

  “We’re going on a wild python hunt.”

  4

  On the flight to Miami, I had passed the hours reading a natural history guide to South Florida. The book included a section devoted to imported reptiles—notably, Burmese pythons and Nile monitor lizards—that had either escaped captivity or been released by negligent pet owners. Without natural predators, these two invasive species had taken over the wet prairies, pine hammocks, and cypress swamps south of Lake Okeechobee. Biologists had found deer fawns, raccoons, wi
ld piglets, marsh rabbits, and even alligators inside the bellies of the pythons. Out of desperation, the state was holding derbies with cash prizes for civilian hunters who killed the most and biggest snakes.

  That afternoon, a hiker had reported an enormous Burmese python near a trailhead in the Big Cypress National Preserve. Stacey was joining a biologist friend in an attempt to locate and capture the monster snake before it swallowed someone’s toddler. She told me to meet her at a place called Fortymile Bend, ten minutes west of the Miccosukee Restaurant.

  “It’ll be like old times,” she promised.

  That was what worried me. We had brought out the worst in each other more often than the best. By ourselves, we were daredevils. Together, we were a pair of lunatics.

  But how could I resist the adventure of hunting a serpent that reached lengths of twenty feet and could weigh as much as two hundred pounds?

  The sun was setting, but I couldn’t see it for the black clouds boiling out of the Gulf. As I neared Shark Valley, I saw the first blue pulses of electricity lighting up the thunderheads from within. The wind blew palm fronds and palmetto fans onto the slick blacktop. By the time the sign for Fortymile Bend appeared in my headlights, the rain was pelting my windshield like bird shot.

  A Land Rover with a canoe strapped to the roof rack flicked its headlights as I turned into a circular drive outside the Tamiami Ranger Station. I pulled on my raincoat and hurried across the surface of crushed white shells that seemed to be what road builders used here in lieu of gravel. The wet air smelled of swamp plants my northern nose couldn’t identify.

  Inside the Rover, she pulled me close enough that the fumes from the bug dope on her skin knocked me out. She looked leaner, with the beginnings of wrinkles around her almond-shaped eyes. She placed a tanned hand on either side of my face.

  “You’re all grown-up!”

  “I like to think I was before.”

  “Do you have a head net and bug suit?”

  “I am an investigator. I was here doing background checks.”

  She always became most beautiful when she laughed. “You really have no idea what you’re in for tonight. Florida mosquitoes are relentless. They make the Terminator look weak-willed.”

  “They can’t be any worse than the blackflies back home.”

  “That’s like saying death by hanging can’t be any worse than death by firing squad.” She handed me a small bottle of mosquito repellent. “You should buckle up. The drive to Gator Hook Strand is going to be wet and wild.”

  She put the transmission into gear and skidded onto the back road that split off the four-lane, heading southwest into what looked like real backcountry.

  “I can’t believe you’re really here,” she said, smiling again. “Stranger in a strange land.”

  “You seem to have adapted.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. Did my mom and dad make you promise to come see me when they heard you were visiting Florida?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  Charley and Ora Stevens had been heartbroken when Stacey and I split up. Ora had intuited that things hadn’t been great for a while. But Charley had nurtured dreams of grandchildren.

  “Being so far from my folks is the hardest part of living here,” she said. “I keep inviting them down, but you know how my mom feels about planes.”

  Ora Stevens had been paralyzed below the waist in a plane crash during a flying lesson from her husband. He’d walked away from the wreckage with nothing but a broken arm and a crushing weight on his conscience.

  “Of course, my dad knows South Florida like the back of his hand from the months he spent here back in the aughts.”

  “What?”

  “The State of Florida hired him to help with an aerial survey, counting manatees.”

  “He never told me that!”

  She twitched her nose bewitchingly. “Charley Stevens, international man of mystery.”

  I slathered bug dope behind my ears. It smelled like the liquid poison it was. “How is your job going?”

  “Besides soul-crushing? We had forty Florida panthers killed in the state last year, up from the year before. We build fences along the highways and wildlife underpasses they can use to cross from one side to the other, but that doesn’t help along all the back roads, where people speed along at night at eighty miles an hour. Meanwhile, development keeps encroaching into their habitat because what’s the value of an endangered species compared to selling the next Del Boca Vista? And now we’re seeing a crippling disorder in some of the cats that inhibits coordination of their rear legs. Wasn’t there a crazy king who tried to fight the rising tide with a sword? That’s me.”

  “Since when does your work involve catching pythons?”

  “It doesn’t, but once a biologist, always a biologist. My friend Buster is in charge of python eradication for the National Park Service. And God knows he needs the help.”

  “From what I read, it sounds like the snakes are here to stay.”

  “That depends on your frame of reference.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In fifty years, South Florida will be underwater and the pythons will be Georgia’s problem. So you said the Warden Service is looking for a new chief warden pilot? Maybe I should apply.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Who says I’m joking?”

  I must have shown alarm.

  “You should see the look on your face,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m just having fun with you.”

  At the edge of the high beams, I saw a mud-spattered Ford Expedition with what I assumed was a snake-spotting tower bolted onto the SUV’s roof.

  A wide-beamed man in jeans and hip waders leaned over the tailgate, rummaging around for something. He straightened up when he heard our engine. He had long gray hair beneath a camouflage-patterned fedora, a stubble beard, and skin the color of a baked ham.

  “That’s Buster Lee. If anyone can find this snake, it’s him.” She opened her door and leaned out. “I’ve brought along a helper.”

  The man’s drawl was so slow and syrupy it had to be a put-on. “The swamp’s no place for amateurs, Stevens.”

  “This is Mike Bowditch. My game warden friend from Maine. You remember me telling you about him?”

  He was wearing a safari shirt stretched tight across his belly. In one hand, he held a floppy canvas bag; in the other, a five-foot-long hooked tool. Presumably a snake-catching device. “He doesn’t look like any conservation officer I ever met.”

  Stacey shook her head at me in mock disbelief. I couldn’t remember seeing her in such high spirits.

  Despite the bug dope, the mosquitoes had already begun to mob the bare skin of my face and the fleshy parts of my exposed hands.

  Finally, Buster let the deadpan drop. “Hell, son, I’m just having fun with you. Any friend of Stevens is a friend of mine. So you’re the warden she’s always going on about.”

  “Stacey tells me you’re Florida’s champion python-catcher.”

  He struck a heroic pose with the hooked tool and the gunnysack. “I don’t call myself that, understand? It’s an honorific others have bestowed upon me. But I’m not going to say I don’t deserve the title. Is this your first python hunt, Warden Mike?”

  “They haven’t made it to Maine yet, fortunately—except as pets.”

  “That’s how they arrived here, too.” He fastened a headlamp over his brimmed fedora and fiddled with it to get the beam properly aligned. “Florida is the world capital of unintended consequences.”

  The raindrops slapped the flat leaves of the palmettos. Lightning flashed to the south, but the thunder took a long time rolling across the saw grass prairie. At least we would be safe from electrocution.

  “How do you plan on finding a snake in the dark?” I asked.

  Buster let his drawl drop. “The man who reported it said it was ‘in blue.’”

  “That means its eyes were opaque,” explained Stacey. “It’s getting ready to shed its
skin.”

  “Shedding snakes go inactive,” Buster explained. “The little ones hide—because they’re vulnerable—but these big boys and girls don’t have natural enemies; they’re the new apex predators in town, so they just camp out wherever. Go into temporary brumation.”

  “That’s like hibernation,” Stacey translated.

  “Enough talking,” said the python-catcher, recovering his false drawl. “More walking.”

  We began our hike, single file across a board bridge and down the wet path, illuminating both sides with our headlamps. Lush green ferns sprouted everywhere except in spots where pale limestone outcroppings poked through the humus. The trees along the trail were too scraggly to keep off the face-smacking rain. I recognized a few species from my nature guide: live oak, poisonwood, gumbo-limbo. All the trunks were crawling with big, banded snails like mobile carbuncles.

  The mud sucked with real determination at my shoes, eager to steal them from my feet. The onslaught of mosquitoes continued, unabated. I wondered which disease I was most likely to contract: malaria, dengue fever, or the Zika virus.

  “Don’t let Buster fool you,” Stacey said in a whisper. “He’s not even from the South. He got a Ph.D. in herpetology from the University of Wisconsin. He just gets a kick out of playing the cracker.”

  “Kind of like your father, except he’s a different brand of cracker.”

  “Touché.”

  Off in the darkness, not a hundred feet away, something screamed. Not called, not shrieked, but screamed. My first morbid thought was of a young girl being stabbed to death.

  Stacey didn’t slow or stop.

  From around the next bend, Buster called to us, “Hey, lovebirds!”

  We hurried in the direction of his voice and found the herpetologist huffing wind beside a bench.

  He had his headlamp focused on the ground at his boots, but as we approached, he raised the beam just enough to show a pale, coiled form in the slough. If the python hadn’t been shedding its skin, I never would have spotted it.

  Stacey let out a whistle. “She’s huge.”

  “How do you know it’s a she?” I asked in a whisper.